The Girl Who Was Taken

by Charlie Donlea

  “Damn,” she said.

  Death had a way of permeating things—clothes and shoes were most common. But hair was the worst. Despite the tight bun Maggie Larson had taught her, some part of poor Mrs. Wilkes had come home with Livia. She checked her watch. There was time for a quick shower. As she turned on the water, she hoped Kent Chapple was wrong about the rest of the week. Death rot was getting old in a hurry.

  Under the shower, Livia mentally reviewed what she had learned from her search the night before after returning home with Casey Delevan’s files. She read every article he had collected on Nancy Dee, who disappeared from a small Virginia town without a trace and turned up dead six months later. Unlike Gertrude Wilkes, Nancy Dee had not died peacefully in her sleep. And sadly, she had plenty of family around to hear the morbid details. Her body was buried in a shallow grave in the woods and discovered by a roaming dog and its owner.

  Livia also read about Paula D’Amato, a Georgia Tech freshman who went missing eight months before Nancy Dee, and whose whereabouts were still a mystery. Diana Wells, the third girl profiled in Casey Delevan’s drawer, was harder to figure. Some quick Google stalking Monday night told Livia that Diana Wells was a student at Elizabeth City State University. Livia had managed to track down a phone number and, earlier in the day while she was on the way to Gertrude Wilkes’s house, had reached Diana Wells.

  Out of the shower and with the smell of death gone from her hair, Livia made the long drive back to Emerson Bay and entered the Starbucks in East Bay. For a place that sold coffee and pastries, it was packed at eight p.m. with kids on laptops plugged into tabletop outlets, students in various modes of study, and couples talking over cappuccinos.

  Taking a seat at the bar, Livia gave three women expectant looks when they entered, offering eye contact and a small smile. They each ignored her. A fourth woman walked in with similar searching eyes, scanning the café until her gaze fell on Livia, who held up her hand in a gentle wave. The woman came over as Livia stood up.

  “Diana?”

  “Yeah. Are you Dr. Cutty?”

  “Yes, thanks for meeting me.”

  Diana Wells held a confused look on her face, a deep crease forming between her eyebrows. “I guess I was expecting someone older.”

  “I just finished my residency. Can I get you a coffee?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have a vanilla latte.”

  Seated across from each other a few minutes later, Livia pulled out a yellow legal pad. She observed Diana Wells. An overweight girl, one side of her head was shaved nearly bald, with a sudden part that gave way to a wave of purple hair combed to the side. A nose ring and a lip ring and too much makeup begged for discovery and attention.

  “I don’t want to waste your time, Diana, so I’ll get right to the point. How did you know Casey Delevan?”

  “I didn’t really know him. I mean, I didn’t even know his last name until I saw him on the news as the guy who jumped from Points Bridge. I just met him once.” There was a short pause. “You really pulled him out of the bay?”

  “Not exactly. I did the autopsy on him. How did you meet him?” Livia asked, trying to find a way to elicit information from this girl without mentioning that Diana was profiled in Casey Delevan’s drawer along with two other girls—one dead, the other missing—and not daring to discuss her suspicion that Diana Wells was next on his list.

  “At a bar,” Diana said.

  Livia waited.

  “Look, I talked to the police about this already.”

  “About Casey Delevan?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “That summer,” Diana said. “The summer I tried to join the club.”

  Livia cocked her head to the side. “What club?”

  Diana looked at Livia with another puzzled expression. “The Capture Club. I thought that’s what you were calling about.”

  Livia contemplated the best approach to handle Diana Wells and decided honesty was easiest.

  “There were some confusing findings in the postmortem exam. I’m trying to get some more information about Casey Delevan from people who knew him.”

  “Confusing, like, he didn’t jump from the bridge?”

  Livia opened her palms and shook her head. “We’re not sure. Tell me about this club.”

  “He called it the Capture Club.”

  “Casey?”

  “Yeah. It was a bunch of people who talked about missing persons cases.”

  “Talked about them, how?”

  “I don’t know, just, discussed them. All the details, what the cops knew, and their own theories.”

  “Cases from around here?”

  “From everywhere. Around the country. Around the world, really. I found out about it after I started talking with Casey in online chat rooms.”

  “So you met him online?”

  “Yeah. No, not really. I mean, I didn’t know his name when I was talking to him online. In the chat rooms he just told me about the club and that he was into missing persons cases just like I was, and that if I was interested in joining the club I could become a member.”

  “And were you interested?”

  “Yeah,” Diana said, shrugging as if others’ judgment meant nothing to her. “I was into that stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Kidnappings.”

  “In what way?”

  “Curious about them. I wanted to know what happened to the people who were taken. I wanted to follow their stories and see what became of them.” Diana shrugged again. “Same as anyone else who reads Events magazine when a missing girl is plastered on its cover.”

  “Okay,” Livia said. “Did you join this club?”

  “I wanted to but . . .”

  Livia waited.

  “To become a member you have to go through an abduction. A fake one.”

  “You have to agree to be kidnapped?”

  “All I said,” Diana continued in a defensive tone, “was that I was interested in the club. I never agreed to the abduction, just said that it sounded cool. Then they surprised me and made me believe it was real. I was drunk the night I met Casey. I had no idea he was the guy from the chat rooms. He made me think he was interested in me. He flirted with me. And at the end of the night, I went with him, got into his car thinking we were going to a late-night party. That’s when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “They put a bag over my head, tied me up, and brought me to some abandoned building.”

  “Christ,” Livia said.

  “But I was so hysterical—I think I went into shock or something—they ended up driving me back to the bar and leaving me in the parking lot.”

  “He didn’t hurt you?”

  “No. Not physically.”

  “Did you ever see Casey again?”

  “Never. Until he was on the news a few weeks ago.”

  “And you went to the police about this? Afterward?”

  “My parents made me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. They said they never found anything about the club, and that I was a willing participant.”

  Livia looked down at the notes she had scribbled. “You said Casey was with a friend. Did you know him?”

  “Two friends. A guy and a girl. I didn’t know them. The girl was the one who put the bag over my head after I got in his car.”

  “How many were there?”

  “In the car? Just Casey and his friends. But after they brought me to that abandoned building, there were lots. Like, twenty or more. The whole club, I guess. But before I saw everyone in the club, it was just Casey and the girl. They tied me to a chair and whispered all these horrible things in my ear. The girl was telling me the things they were going to do to me. All these nasty, disgusting things.

  “You ever see this girl?”

  “No. She was at the bar with Casey, but I never paid attention to her. And when we were in the car, she was in the backseat and it was too da
rk to see her. Then she put the bag over my head.”

  Livia put her pen to the page. “You know this girl’s name. The one who put the bag over your head?”

  “Yeah,” Diana said. “He called her Nicole.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Two early-morning transports with the investigators had Livia back to the OCME by two p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. She sat behind her desk in the fellows’ office and perused the Internet. She was looking for anything she could find about Casey Delevan or the strange group of twisted individuals Diana Wells had called the Capture Club, whose membership Livia was scared to admit included Nicole. Although Livia found no specific organization by this name, she did manage to locate a strong online presence of people interested in the details of current and past missing people.

  After an hour of research, she turned her attention back to Casey Delevan. In a defunct website from 2015 that had not been updated for some time, Livia found an advertisement for Two Guys Handyman Service. Listed were Casey Delevan and Nathaniel Theros. There was a phone number and address. Livia wrote both down just as Kent Chapple poked his head into her office.

  “We’re done for the day, Doc. Any calls after three o’clock go to the second shift. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Kent,” Livia said.

  She ripped the sticky note containing Nathaniel Theros’s information from the pad and left the office. Mr. Theros lived on the west side of Emerson Bay, not quite a two-hour drive from Raleigh. Her brakes squeaked when she stopped in front of his house—a single-story ranch with overgrown shrubs, unkempt grass, and weeds pushing through the sidewalk cracks. Nathaniel Theros’s house sat in a crumbling neighborhood of other dilapidated homes that made up the ruins of West Emerson Bay, where industry had died over the last few decades as factories shut down and moved overseas. The years had seen a great transformation take place in Emerson Bay, when shipping and port industries spread to the north and south, as if a drop of detergent had fallen onto Emerson Bay and pushed away the greasy factories and grimy shipping yards, leaving behind the squeaky-clean waterfront community of East Emerson Bay, called East Bay by locals, which was hip and young and booming. The waterfront homes attracted the wealthy, and tourism was rampant. Restaurants, shops, and galleries prospered as local residents and tourists walked the cobblestone streets and ate on verandas while staring at the bay and watching restored steamboats chug up and down the waterway.

  But when tourism took root and sprouted to become the major economy in Emerson Bay, the west side suffered. Without the factories or the shipping yards, and without the benefit of a beautiful waterfront, West Bay became the dying side of town with crumbling shells of old refineries, and train yards that made for noisy living. What used to be a place where hard-working folk retreated after a day on the docks or in the factories, a place where a small yard for your kids and safe streets in the neighborhood were enough for a pleasant existence, West Bay now was somewhere only visited when necessary. And for Livia, today there was no way around it.

  One last check of the address, then she walked up the steps and rang the bell. Dogs barked incessantly and clawed the door from the other side. There was some yelling and corralling before the door finally opened.

  “What’s up?” the man said.

  “Nathaniel Theros?”

  “Only if I’m in trouble. Nate, otherwise.”

  Livia smiled. “No trouble. My name’s Livia Cutty. I wanted to ask you a weird question.”

  The man was bent over, holding a large Rottweiler by its collar. Faded tattoos crept from under his T-shirt, down his arms and up his neck. He pulsed his eyebrows. “I like weird.”

  “You used to know a guy named Casey Delevan?”

  Instant smile. “Oh, yeah. While back.”

  “Mind if I ask you some questions about him?”

  “He in trouble?”

  “You could say that.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No, I’m a doctor.”

  Nate made a strange face. “Gimme a sec. I’ll put Daisy away.”

  Livia waited on the porch while Nate disappeared into the house, dragging Daisy reluctantly with him as the Rottweiler growled and barked. She heard the rattle of a cage, then Nate was back. He pushed through the screen door and walked onto the front stoop, sat against the railing opposite her, and lit a cigarette that glowed in the October dusk. “So why’s a doctor asking about Casey Delevan?”

  “Curiosity, mostly. I work over at the OCME.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Medical Examiner’s office in Raleigh. I’m a fellow finishing my training.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like CSI stuff?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Shit,” Nate said with a smile. “What sort of trouble is Casey in?”

  “There was a body pulled out of Emerson Bay a few weeks ago. You hear about that?”

  Nate nodded his head. “Heard about it.”

  “ID came back as your pal, Casey.”

  Nate smiled as though Livia were putting him on, then put his cigarette to his mouth. “You telling me Casey’s dead?”

  Livia nodded. “Sorry. It’s been on the news.”

  “I don’t got a TV, just Internet. And I ain’t been around the last few weeks. What happened to him?”

  “Not sure yet,” Livia lied. “He was found floating in the bay, so some people are guessing he killed himself. Jumped from Points Bridge. You two used to work together?”

  “Yeah, like, I don’t even know how long ago. Couple years, maybe. We had a carpentry company. You know, handyman stuff for rich guys in East Bay who don’t know how to do any of that.” Nate smiled as he reminisced. “We had some jobs lined up, too. Doing pretty good. Then one day, he stopped showing up. After a week, I knew he was gone.”

  “Gone, dead?”

  “Shit, no. Just gone. Casey was a drifter. He’d been all over the place and I got the impression Emerson Bay was just a stop for him. When he didn’t show for work, I figured he moved on to his next place. But I mean”—Nate shrugged—“I could see him jumping off a bridge. He was the craziest sumbitch I ever knew. Pretty dark, too, sometimes. Depressed, maybe, I don’t know.”

  “When was that? That Casey stopped showing up for work?”

  Nate gave a confused look, like Livia was challenging him with a calculus question. “Don’t know. It was a while ago.”

  “Let’s backtrack. When did you guys start Two Guys? Your handyman company. In the summer?”

  “No. It was springtime.” Nate thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Figured we’d try to get all the richies wanting to paint their big homes and remodel before summer came along.”

  “So spring of 2016, then? That was . . . let’s say, twenty months ago?”

  Nate wrinkled his forehead. “Yeah, I guess. Couple years, like I said.”

  “Okay. So you started in spring. And you said you had some work?”

  “Oh, yeah. We were busy.”

  “Can you remember how long you and Casey worked together?”

  Nate sucked on his cancer stick and rocked his head back and forth as if he were listening to music. “Few months. ’Member it being really hot that summer, and we were doing a lot of exteriors. We were painting a big house on the bay. It was so hot we had to hide from the sun, sort of follow the shadows throughout the day so we could paint in the shade.” Nate shook his head now as it came back to him. “That’s right. ’Member that now ’cause we were just halfway done when Casey took off. Left me to finish the sumbitch by myself. Big beach house. Yeah, now I got it. Guy paid me when I was done, and I even saved some cash to give Casey when he showed his face. After a few weeks, I figured the money was mine. He ain’t comin’ back.”

  “That was summertime,” Livia sad. “Do you remember which month?”

  Nate thought for a minute. “I don’t got the company no more. When Casey took off, I couldn’t do it by myself. But I saved the paperwork for my taxes. Still got it in a
folder somewhere. Want me to check when we did that house?”

  “Would you mind?”

  “Gimme a minute.”

  Livia stood on the front porch while Nate headed inside. He returned five minutes later.

  “August,” he said as he came through the screen door. He was holding a small calendar book he read from. “Job took three weeks. Started August thirteenth, finished by myself September fifth. Last time I saw Casey was that first week we worked on the house. He showed up that whole week, then never came back after the weekend. If I’m remembering right. So I guess that would be”—Nate consulted the old pocket calendar where he used to track his jobs—“Friday, August nineteenth. Last time I saw him.” He looked up at Livia. “Best I can ’member.”

  Livia stared at the book in his hands. Her face stayed stoic but her mind was frantic. Nicole had disappeared on Saturday, August twentieth, from a beach party that most of Emerson Bay High seniors had attended. Livia remembered Art Munson, the landlord who reported Casey missing in November. With three months of rent prepaid, it’s possible Casey disappeared in August along with Nicole. And it was possible that the time of death, determined by the anthropology department at the OCME to be twelve to eighteen months, was that same weekend.

  Her thoughts veered in unorganized directions and for a moment Dr. Cutty, who was trained to take random discoveries and make sense of them, stood with no tools to collect the information she was gathering, no ability to put the pieces together into anything cohesive. The random bits of knowledge popped into her mind—about the weekend Nicole went missing and that it might have coincided with Casey’s disappearance. About the two of them dating. About the perverse group called the Capture Club. About Casey Delevan’s body turning up on her autopsy table. Her mind flashed back to Dr. Larson and the skewers she had used to probe the mysterious piercings in Casey’s skull. The “shovel” contusions on his upper arms. His shirt caked in clay from the ground in which he was originally buried. The ropes and the cinder blocks and the fisherman who had pulled him from the bottom of the bay.